Day: October 24, 2021

More Die of Heartbreak

St. Petersburg Photo Diary
Facebook
October 23, 2021

Orthodontist jumps from 9th floor of Elizabeth Hospital

The young woman made the jump in front of her fellow patients in the ward. The fact was that she had buried both of her parents in the past two weeks. They were also doctors, by the way.

Darya Khorovskaya followed in the footsteps of her parents: she had worked in her field for 10 years.

She was admitted to the Elizabeth Hospital with complications from an infectious disease just a few days after her mother’s death.

Her fellow patients in the ward said that the young women was heartbroken. She constantly talked about the deaths of her loved ones, blaming the coronavirus.

After the fall, she was taken to the intensive care unit, but they could not save her.

Photo courtesy of St. Petersburg Photo Diary. MK.RU Sankt-Peterburg reported this same story on 17 October 2021. They made clear, however, what is not clear from the Facebook post above: that Khorovskaya was being treated for covid-19 when she took her own life, and that her parents had also died of covid-19. P.S. This is a more typical post on St. Petersburg Photo Diary, which partly explains the self-censorship in their post about Khorovskaya’s suicide. Translated by the Russian Reader

Fourteen Years Before the Mast

“I grew up really appreciating a curated journey.”
– Young pop star, “Weekend Morning Edition,” NPR, 23 October 2021

It was fourteen years ago today that I began my own “curated journey” in blogging. For my first post, I translated this little gem of paradoxical “geopolitical” thought by the artist and writer Pavel Pepperstein.

Since that day, there have been 2,945 more entries (including this one) on this website, a very long detour on Chtodelat News, which I edited and almost completely wrote for over five years, generating another 793 posts in the process, and Living in FIN, a place for my occasional forays into Finnish poetry and South Karelian living, where I’ve made an even 200 scratch marks on the wall so far. So quite soon, maybe this year even, I will have reached out to the wide world 3,000 times in this peculiar roundabout way.

Knowing that these anniversaries were around the corner, I’ve been making speeches in my head, some more structured and constructive, others more grandiloquent and sentimental. But now that one of these anniversaries has actually dawned, I don’t feel like preaching to the choir. If you’re already here, it means you get it, whatever “it” is.

That means you might want me to keep making this website. How can you help me do that?

1. Ensure a steady flow of new “Russian readers” by getting the word out via social media. Every time any of you reposts what I write here, I immediately see the number of readers double, triple, quadruple and so forth. Last year, for whatever reason, you and I were grooving on the same inner plane more often than not, and I had nearly 175,000 views at the end of it. This year, though, the reposting — and thus the influx of new readers — has seemingly dried up, so I’ll be lucky to reach a third of last year’s encouraging audience numbers.

2. Donate money to me via PayPal or Ko-Fi. In addition to paying for hosting, internet and subscriptions to the Russian independent media I read and share here in translation, I would like to be able to pay the occasional guest translator a fee as well. And, if there is money left over, even pay myself a bit. Making this website, especially the translating, is a lot of work.

3. Follow me on social media (Facebook, Telegram, Twitter, Ello, Tumblr) and repost those heads-up whenever you can, thus getting more folks hooked on this funny website and letting me know that what I do here has value for more than just me and a few other people.

Thanks for your support!

Photo and text by the Russian Reader